Patent Medicine

The Supreme Court's surprisingly humane -- to me, anyway -- unanimous ruling that companies may not patent human DNA isolated from a chromosome seems most likely to have resulted from a fortuitous collision between "Oooh, ick!" faith-based disinclination to mess with what God gived us just to satisfy the rapacious appetites of what Ned Beatty in Network called "the fundamental forces of nature," to wit, large and largely soulless corporate interests. That also probably accounts for the narrowness of the ruling and the drawing of what appear to be careful boundaries between naturally occurring DNA and what the companies ultimately can produce from it. The court held that those products can be patented, while the genetic material cannot be. As always, the best read is Lyle Denniston's "Plain English" explanation - which latter is needed desperately in any case involving both Supreme Court jurisprudence and cutting-edge molecular and genetic research, a combination that may well represent the Event Horizon of incomprehensible jargon.

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(And, in that regard, I'm willing to give Justice Antonin (Short Time) Scalia a pass for saying, "I am unable to affirm those details on my own knowledge or even my own belief." Any time a Supreme Court justice -- particularly that one -- is willing to admit he doesn't understand the material is a good day for the rest of us.)

The most important part of the rulingis the hope it gives to millions of Americans who live under the cloud of genetic disease. (Which, not for nothing, includes this particular one.) It's hard enough living with that shadow in your life, but the idea that your treatment could be depend on the sharpies in some research company's patent-law division was downright maddening. This also should blow the doors off the research community, which also is a good thing. This is a decision that bends toward freedom in a number of ways not envisioned by the Founders.

"We just are so glad that women and our genes are not being held hostage by a private corporation any more," said Lisbeth Ceriani, a Massachusetts breast cancer survivor who is one of the plaintiffs in the suit The researchers whose lawsuit prompted the decision were also celebrating. They say it will make genetic tests cheaper and far more widely available in the future. "I think it changes everything," Dr. Harry Ostrer, a genetics expert at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and one of the main plaintiffs in the case, told NBC News.

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I admit that I thought the Roberts Court would bend toward the rights of corporations again, and the measured tone of the decision indicates that, at the very least, it remains sensitive to the tender feelings of the country's oligarchs. But this was a Court acting out of modesty based on complex scientific material that (I believe) most of the justices didn't really understand. But they all seemed to understand the human impact of the science on which they were ruling, and that seems to have carried the day, and good on them for that. Thanks, Clarence.